Does anyone think they can buy an x86 matching that spec for $650?! Maybe you can get an ugly white box with an external 17" monitor for $1000-1100. So yeah, you pay a few hundred for much better ergonomics, aesthetics, usability, stability, etc.
I don't mind "ugly" white boxes, and i prefer modular and generic over specialized and integrated. Take for example my bad past experiences trying to fix broken mac hardware w/ integrated monitors: if the power board goes, good luck fixing it affordably. Where as with a PC you just stick in a new PS, or replace the monitor, with a Mac the whole thing is screwed.
What if you wat to upgrade your monitor? Oops can't (unless you have a source for Apple parts $$) -- it's attached w/ all kids of funny internal connectors... and then do you have any upgrade path? Admitedly Mac hardware is much better now than it used to be, but it's still too fiddly and proprietary in many areas. OWC sells good supplies to outfit desktop Macs, just make sure to get a reasonably normal tower model.
No more single button mice, it's terrible. I use a Microsoft Mouse w/ my Mac (5 button Optical Trackball) -- explain how I'm suppose to live w/ a single button and use X11-apps effiently?
Bullship... I've seen way too many sucky movies with stupid Computer scenes.. Most of the hacker movies were spoiled because of fake computers and anoying beeping noises or fake 1980ish floppy drive seek sounds on modern PCs accessing a HD for funks sake. Most of the action movies, suck -- no blow royally -- because all of the computer or technology scenes turn you off of the already thin plot, and the relative improbablity of the technical subplot just makes you want to cry because of the amount of time you have just wasted.
Just because the movie was a thriller doesn't make it immune from being stupid if it is so dumb as to unecessarily portray technology issues incorrectly. It's a brain-dead notion to assume technology is somehow an irrelevent element of the plot, or to on purpose obscure the realism of technology just because some half-assed film consultant wants to insert more suspenseful bleeps or doctored animations. Are you going to eat that tripe? It's like what flash does to webpages! YUK, count me out..
Well regardless, I love the fact that they keep binaries such as hard to find.tgz's and shelved projects. It's amazing how some things just seem to fall off the net, and then are almost impossible to locate.
I so hope, that they don't have to contend with any legal troubles which might interfere with the initiative. If so, they should move the archive to an island, move the servers to switzerland, or a boat somewhere at sea, where they can have legal immunity. This is too great a cause to have tangled up in a brainless legal mess.
: In the past media degeneration and obscelecense
: over time have made the decisions for us. But
: going forward we will have massive distributed,
: redundant data stores, with geographically
: remote backups. The data isn't going to go away
: unless we tell it to.
GOOD! And there is something *wrong* with this??
Seriously -- the Internet should have been designed like this from the start. Don't ever throw away, simply classify and organize. In a throw away world, we already destroy too much to afford loosing what's on the Internet.
Given, there is lots of junk and what some might consider noise, but... (as the saying goes) some peoples junk is others treasure.
Is IBM trying to steal IP? I've built tools that do this before, and so has a gazillion others.
This is simply brain dead. That's like trying to patent the idea of a WYSIWYG HTML editor or the concept of prepackaged brownie mix (that doesn't require you to know how to mix the ingredients yourself)-- or all tools that can write macros based on simplified user input and a predefined formula (wasn't there someone much before IBM that invented this idea). Asside from patenting specific inovations IBM actually implemented in this field, how are they gonna pull that one off since everyone except IBM are the originators of these ideas. IBM didn't invent this, and surely wasn't the first company to build web templates that can be assembled with-out HTML coding!
However, more people are less likely to commute long distances (creating 1 less car in traffic burning lots of fuel and wasting time) if they can have a small office near home or a small home office. HS Internet is an attractive thing to have at an office these days although, you can't move everything to the rural areas/suburbs just because (gee-whiz!) you got wireless Internet.
Yes! I think 802.11b is what we all need in the rural areas that are say at the most 15-30 miles from town but still can't get service even if there is a CO only 5-10 km away. Also providers are building backbones from downtown areas to remote communities by installing biger pipes than the standard maximum (stress max) 11Mbps stuff like the Cisco Aironet 340/350 or Lucent stuff. They are using 45Mbps or greater as a cheap alternative to service areas where fiber doesn't go, Ma Bell wants too much money for, or to areas that have dark fiber just lying there, that cost a fortune to install, that no one -- wants to (due to lack of money) -- or is smart enough (even if they have the money) to light up and connect people to.
If Cisco, Lucent and Nortel want any type of increased demands in their core fiber products on the home front (to help them out in returning to better times) they should consider wireless 2.4GHz and the last mile their good friend. They need more people demanding more bandwidth in more locations, doing more, for longer. That is what will allow us all to be modern and do such advanced things as download large email attachments, get our repulsive Flash animations sooner, or CVSup in less time [windows equivalent: get patches and chunky bloated shareware quicker] (-- wow, the future is here). But what it will really do is get people downloading more pr0n and mp3z, so then the need for bandwidth will sky-rocket and the backbones will need to be upgraded at ever more frequent rates not to mention HD sales will triple.
Seriously, part of the problem of why the Internet companies are doing so bad, is cause they didn't get it to enough people soon enough, at a low enough cost, fast enough and that even if they did most people don't care and consider it an expensive luxury. And the reason so many.com companies are doing so bad, was that not enough people take the Internet seriously because it's either too slow or still considered a luxury. The masses are in need of some education about the Internet *still*. It's a tool to me, not some entertainment service that should be rapidly commercialized or be ruled by the economics of media!
Well, as you can tell I'm frustrated that things aren't moving forward for the better for everyone yet. The tech "overcapacity" is really an underlying "undercapacity" with regards to actual implementation!!
Here in Ontario there are many wireless 802.11(b) networks poping up that help fill in that large gaping hole in the infrastructure that Rogers and Bell Canada have left. I have been investigating building a repeater.. costs less than $7000CDN for a 96' tower these days (not including equipment) and that can cover a fair community so that line of sight issues aren't as big a concern. Think of the problem like a right angle triangle with the tower the opposite side and tree obsticles perpendicular from adjacent side. The closer and taller the service tower, the less likely the need for an additional tower at the site.
The problem with the freenet concept is what I would consider a fair disadvantage in topology and cost duplication and the fact that it makes more sense to build one large tower and do point to multipoint where possible for both cost and speed. However nothing tops the freenet layout for underserviced areas that are on the fringes of a populated center or that can touch another tower that is close. Just hop through the terain and onto a landline, no worries about planning a big tower.
In Ontario there are both community networks and some independant ISPs starting to role out the services such as Storm Internet (sister to CDSP). Some areas have had wireless for a couple of years now.
Is DD/SH now a lost language that only exists as a faint memory in the minds of the few surviving followers of yester-year and the dd/sh monks now awaiting their untimely death? Does anyone have a copy of the sacred parchament?
That manuf. in the GB race are falling behind in quality? I've had more large xxGB drives fail than ones that are smaller than 20GB. And most of the 20GB or smaller ones have been running 24/7 ever since they were purchased (long before the larger drives.) One brand I don't like is Maxtor, I lost a lot of stuff of a 40GB drive after rebooting once, and the drive rattles now (did the head break off?). WD no problems, Fujitsu no problems, Quantum no problems.
In hind-sight the pricing was quite reasonable and I would have subscribed much earlier. I think part of the problem is that since I was holding off on it and many other things, I just opted to not post anything controversial. For instance: Say I wanted to publish my critism of IBMs DMCA stance in Canada. What if by chance I worked at a contractor that does work for IBM?
What if I wanted to critize a political party, but then I would be on record as supporting another party?
That is what ZKS Freedom was for!
It was ahead of it's time technically and more people should have used it while they could have.
One thing that slowed me down to subscribing was the large price tag (in the big bucks). Another issue was that Freedom didn't integrate well with my BSD machines or provide a single point of network integration. It was client software by nature.
I think people didn't ever give Freedom enough credit for what it could do. I remember talking to some people on various unamed IRC channels and they basically didn't buy the concept and discounted it's level of anonymity equating it with digital certificates and their problems. But I am sure half of them didn't even read what it was all about. Most people in the know, could have attested that the concept was fairly sound for what it was meant to do. It wasn't for secret government communication.
This sucks... but then again there were some features that would have made it easier to use. Such as a model to make it more of a network service, than simply a client software package. The client end could have communicated back to a site server (not to be confused with a freedom AIP servers.) Something like that. Maybe we can make the non-client side Open Source and setup some servers to create the infrastructure?
Another privacy service down the tubes! This one even had a sound amount of research and testing behind it and a well thought out protocol. I think the ZKS team was a good team with a good concept and a nobel cause.
The Internet is no better for this loss!
I was testing it in the early stages, and found it worked well, even through NATed firewalls (with a few tweaks to allowed ports). I was going to subscribe, but I didn't get to it yet. Just as well. We need more privacy tools, not less. Freedom wasn't helping terrorists -- it was helping each and every one of us who are law abidding and value our privacy!
It was a solution to us who have to go over a less than trusted backbone and we didn't have to worry about the costs of tunelling to an expensive co-located server. It was much better than that, as it provided a somewhat effective level of anonymity. It was good in situations where you are posting something that someone could use against you, like controversial views for example. It allowed you to keep a seperation from your personal life, and what your employer could link to you for instance.
The only comperable service that I see coming even close is anonymizer. Freedom was way better than anonymizer in some ways as far as the level of anonymity it would provide. But also anonymizer has some advantages that Freedom didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone think they can buy an x86 matching that spec for $650?! Maybe you can get an ugly white box with an external 17" monitor for $1000-1100. So yeah, you pay a few hundred for much better ergonomics, aesthetics, usability, stability, etc.
I don't mind "ugly" white boxes, and i prefer modular and generic over specialized and integrated. Take for example my bad past experiences trying to fix broken mac hardware w/ integrated monitors: if the power board goes, good luck fixing it affordably. Where as with a PC you just stick in a new PS, or replace the monitor, with a Mac the whole thing is screwed.
What if you wat to upgrade your monitor? Oops can't (unless you have a source for Apple parts $$) -- it's attached w/ all kids of funny internal connectors... and then do you have any upgrade path? Admitedly Mac hardware is much better now than it used to be, but it's still too fiddly and proprietary in many areas. OWC sells good supplies to outfit desktop Macs, just make sure to get a reasonably normal tower model.
But you must be forgetting the PPC clones... too bad they all got the axe.
Yuck.. and I grew up using earlier B&W macs
No more single button mice, it's terrible. I use a Microsoft Mouse w/ my Mac (5 button Optical Trackball) -- explain how I'm suppose to live w/ a single button and use X11-apps effiently?
Bullship... I've seen way too many sucky movies with stupid Computer scenes.. Most of the hacker movies were spoiled because of fake computers and anoying beeping noises or fake 1980ish floppy drive seek sounds on modern PCs accessing a HD for funks sake. Most of the action movies, suck -- no blow royally -- because all of the computer or technology scenes turn you off of the already thin plot, and the relative improbablity of the technical subplot just makes you want to cry because of the amount of time you have just wasted.
Just because the movie was a thriller doesn't make it immune from being stupid if it is so dumb as to unecessarily portray technology issues incorrectly. It's a brain-dead notion to assume technology is somehow an irrelevent element of the plot, or to on purpose obscure the realism of technology just because some half-assed film consultant wants to insert more suspenseful bleeps or doctored animations. Are you going to eat that tripe? It's like what flash does to webpages! YUK, count me out..
Fight back! And snap out of the stupidity.
You might be interested in the Free/SWAN project. Check out http://www.freeswan.org. It's a Linux opportunistic encryption framework.
Well regardless, I love the fact that they keep binaries such as hard to find .tgz's and shelved projects. It's amazing how some things just seem to fall off the net, and then are almost impossible to locate.
I so hope, that they don't have to contend with any legal troubles which might interfere with the initiative. If so, they should move the archive to an island, move the servers to switzerland, or a boat somewhere at sea, where they can have legal immunity. This is too great a cause to have tangled up in a brainless legal mess.
: In the past media degeneration and obscelecense
: over time have made the decisions for us. But
: going forward we will have massive distributed,
: redundant data stores, with geographically
: remote backups. The data isn't going to go away
: unless we tell it to.
GOOD! And there is something *wrong* with this??
Seriously -- the Internet should have been designed like this from the start. Don't ever throw away, simply classify and organize. In a throw away world, we already destroy too much to afford loosing what's on the Internet.
Given, there is lots of junk and what some might consider noise, but... (as the saying goes) some peoples junk is others treasure.
I hope people help them out, they have already brought me back to some cool stuff.
This is a noble cause.
Actually the U in UCE stands for Unsolicited. Not always equiv. w/ Unwanted. But by chance most UCE is also unwanted! ;)
You would drop supporting the EFF because of their stance on MAPS? Good god...
Is IBM trying to steal IP? I've built tools that do this before, and so has a gazillion others.
This is simply brain dead. That's like trying to patent the idea of a WYSIWYG HTML editor or the concept of prepackaged brownie mix (that doesn't require you to know how to mix the ingredients yourself)-- or all tools that can write macros based on simplified user input and a predefined formula (wasn't there someone much before IBM that invented this idea). Asside from patenting specific inovations IBM actually implemented in this field, how are they gonna pull that one off since everyone except IBM are the originators of these ideas. IBM didn't invent this, and surely wasn't the first company to build web templates that can be assembled with-out HTML coding!
I submitted this as an article/ask slashdot -- hopefully someone will have a copy! Cam't resist these super-cool languages... =)
And I don't even like minimalist techno.
However, more people are less likely to commute long distances (creating 1 less car in traffic burning lots of fuel and wasting time) if they can have a small office near home or a small home office. HS Internet is an attractive thing to have at an office these days although, you can't move everything to the rural areas/suburbs just because (gee-whiz!) you got wireless Internet.
Yes! I think 802.11b is what we all need in the rural areas that are say at the most 15-30 miles from town but still can't get service even if there is a CO only 5-10 km away. Also providers are building backbones from downtown areas to remote communities by installing biger pipes than the standard maximum (stress max) 11Mbps stuff like the Cisco Aironet 340/350 or Lucent stuff. They are using 45Mbps or greater as a cheap alternative to service areas where fiber doesn't go, Ma Bell wants too much money for, or to areas that have dark fiber just lying there, that cost a fortune to install, that no one -- wants to (due to lack of money) -- or is smart enough (even if they have the money) to light up and connect people to.
.com companies are doing so bad, was that not enough people take the Internet seriously because it's either too slow or still considered a luxury. The masses are in need of some education about the Internet *still*. It's a tool to me, not some entertainment service that should be rapidly commercialized or be ruled by the economics of media!
If Cisco, Lucent and Nortel want any type of increased demands in their core fiber products on the home front (to help them out in returning to better times) they should consider wireless 2.4GHz and the last mile their good friend. They need more people demanding more bandwidth in more locations, doing more, for longer. That is what will allow us all to be modern and do such advanced things as download large email attachments, get our repulsive Flash animations sooner, or CVSup in less time [windows equivalent: get patches and chunky bloated shareware quicker] (-- wow, the future is here). But what it will really do is get people downloading more pr0n and mp3z, so then the need for bandwidth will sky-rocket and the backbones will need to be upgraded at ever more frequent rates not to mention HD sales will triple.
Seriously, part of the problem of why the Internet companies are doing so bad, is cause they didn't get it to enough people soon enough, at a low enough cost, fast enough and that even if they did most people don't care and consider it an expensive luxury. And the reason so many
Well, as you can tell I'm frustrated that things aren't moving forward for the better for everyone yet. The tech "overcapacity" is really an underlying "undercapacity" with regards to actual implementation!!
That should be storm.ca BTW..
Here in Ontario there are many wireless 802.11(b) networks poping up that help fill in that large gaping hole in the infrastructure that Rogers and Bell Canada have left. I have been investigating building a repeater.. costs less than $7000CDN for a 96' tower these days (not including equipment) and that can cover a fair community so that line of sight issues aren't as big a concern. Think of the problem like a right angle triangle with the tower the opposite side and tree obsticles perpendicular from adjacent side. The closer and taller the service tower, the less likely the need for an additional tower at the site.
The problem with the freenet concept is what I would consider a fair disadvantage in topology and cost duplication and the fact that it makes more sense to build one large tower and do point to multipoint where possible for both cost and speed. However nothing tops the freenet layout for underserviced areas that are on the fringes of a populated center or that can touch another tower that is close. Just hop through the terain and onto a landline, no worries about planning a big tower.
In Ontario there are both community networks and some independant ISPs starting to role out the services such as Storm Internet (sister to CDSP). Some areas have had wireless for a couple of years now.
Where have the dd/sh pages gone?
Is DD/SH now a lost language that only exists as a faint memory in the minds of the few surviving followers of yester-year and the dd/sh monks now awaiting their untimely death? Does anyone have a copy of the sacred parchament?
I do.. because I had a 250MB Conner SCSI drive fail!
That manuf. in the GB race are falling behind in quality? I've had more large xxGB drives fail than ones that are smaller than 20GB. And most of the 20GB or smaller ones have been running 24/7 ever since they were purchased (long before the larger drives.) One brand I don't like is Maxtor, I lost a lot of stuff of a 40GB drive after rebooting once, and the drive rattles now (did the head break off?). WD no problems, Fujitsu no problems, Quantum no problems.
Ironically I had my Maxtor fail Diamondmax 40GB fail! ;) It took at least 4 months though.
In hind-sight the pricing was quite reasonable and I would have subscribed much earlier. I think part of the problem is that since I was holding off on it and many other things, I just opted to not post anything controversial. For instance: Say I wanted to publish my critism of IBMs DMCA stance in Canada. What if by chance I worked at a contractor that does work for IBM?
What if I wanted to critize a political party, but then I would be on record as supporting another party?
That is what ZKS Freedom was for!
It was ahead of it's time technically and more people should have used it while they could have.
One thing that slowed me down to subscribing was the large price tag (in the big bucks). Another issue was that Freedom didn't integrate well with my BSD machines or provide a single point of network integration. It was client software by nature.
I think people didn't ever give Freedom enough credit for what it could do. I remember talking to some people on various unamed IRC channels and they basically didn't buy the concept and discounted it's level of anonymity equating it with digital certificates and their problems. But I am sure half of them didn't even read what it was all about. Most people in the know, could have attested that the concept was fairly sound for what it was meant to do. It wasn't for secret government communication.
This sucks... but then again there were some features that would have made it easier to use. Such as a model to make it more of a network service, than simply a client software package. The client end could have communicated back to a site server (not to be confused with a freedom AIP servers.) Something like that. Maybe we can make the non-client side Open Source and setup some servers to create the infrastructure?
Another privacy service down the tubes! This one even had a sound amount of research and testing behind it and a well thought out protocol. I think the ZKS team was a good team with a good concept and a nobel cause.
The Internet is no better for this loss!
I was testing it in the early stages, and found it worked well, even through NATed firewalls (with a few tweaks to allowed ports). I was going to subscribe, but I didn't get to it yet. Just as well. We need more privacy tools, not less. Freedom wasn't helping terrorists -- it was helping each and every one of us who are law abidding and value our privacy!
It was a solution to us who have to go over a less than trusted backbone and we didn't have to worry about the costs of tunelling to an expensive co-located server. It was much better than that, as it provided a somewhat effective level of anonymity. It was good in situations where you are posting something that someone could use against you, like controversial views for example. It allowed you to keep a seperation from your personal life, and what your employer could link to you for instance.
The only comperable service that I see coming even close is anonymizer. Freedom was way better than anonymizer in some ways as far as the level of anonymity it would provide. But also anonymizer has some advantages that Freedom didn't.
2600 is a good example of something people pay to read and that doesn't use advertising to survive.
What about eBay? One of the major underpinnings of PayPals business in the first place?